When the FBI called, I hesitated.
Their request was simple enough. They wanted to bring me into headquarters, for briefings, once a week, for a couple months. Something called the FBI Citizens Academy.
Why me? Agents in the Chicago office were readers. Flattering, though, the way my mind works, I instantly saw that this wasn’t necessarily a compliment — it was entirely possible that my perspective was seen as so woefully ignorant of the world of law enforcement, they felt duty bound to help me get a clue.
Or maybe they just wanted to get me in their clutches. I’d end up handcuffed to a metal chair in a basement, a bright light shining in my face.
One evening a week, for a couple hours, at their Roosevelt Road field office, learning the ins and outs of the department, the problems they face. Battling international terrorism, tracking cybercriminals and bank robbers.
“It sounds like traffic school,” I told my wife.
But I have a personal rule: if you don’t go, you never find out. Plus they would feed us — dinner from a different restaurant each week. Being fed always helps. I signed up.
This was in 2010, so the specific program details do not pop out in mind. There were guest lecturers, short films, tours of their facility. I knew several of the attendees, and the academy was pretty much the entirety of my social life for a while.
What’s strongest is the sense I took away about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were good people, working hard, battling bad guys. I’m sure that was the point. Not that the bureau’s often checkered history was whitewashed. Anyone who read Jonathan Eig’s recent Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Martin Luther King knows how the FBI bugged King’s hotel rooms, using the transcripts to try to blackmail him into silence, to urge him to kill himself, generating dirt they fed to his enemies. Knows that the FBI often strayed from protecting America to protecting a narrow right wing racist image of America.
But they were upfront about their past, if I recall correctly, and seemingly committed to a future of fighting crime rather than committing it. Plus they gave us all sorts of cool FBI swag — folders and baseball caps and T-shirts and gym bags and neat little commemorative medallions. Swag helps.
I felt invested; I still use the gym bag. So even though the past 20 months of Trump 2.0 have been a holy war against the federal government — from Elon Musk shredding departments and seizing data, to wrecking the National Park Service, to USAID being cut by 90%, leading to uncounted deaths around the world, to the Department of Education being cut 40%, and on and on, the entire federal government slashed by 10%, with the money saved handed back to rich people —somehow I found myself thinking about the local FBI office.
Maybe because of the spectacularly inept FBI director, Kash Patel, who would be considered a grotesque, improbable, perhaps racist caricature in a Christopher Buckley novel, but is all too real. From misuse of FBI jets to tales of excessive drinking, Patel has set a gold standard for clownishness and incompetency that stands out even against fierce competition from such future Toxic Bumbler Hall of Famers as health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and secretary of war Pete Hegseth.
We haven’t even mentioned the direct damage to the department’s reputation, from publicly announcing that a record of bestiality would no longer prevent someone from becoming an FBI agent to what is being called ” the gravest intelligence breach of the FBI in history — and perhaps one of the worst in all of U.S. history,” the hacking of the personnel files of current and past FBI agents.
This led me to worry about the morale of my pals at the Chicago office. Somehow, the direct approach — ask the office — seemed both time-consuming and fruitless. At best I’d get administration spin. So I deployed some stealthing of my own and called an experienced local law enforcement official who deals with the Chicago FBI on a regular basis.
“They’re still very good at what they do,” he said, asking that his name not be used due to the circumspection instinctive to law enforcement types. “Their traditions are very strong. They will weather this well.”
Good to hear. Not that “this” is anywhere near over. Even we optimists can, at best, hold out hope that we are seeing, to quote Churchill, “not the end… not even the beginning of the end” but “perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Of course, Churchill said that in 1942. Still a long, difficult slog ahead with many battles to fight and win, and success in no way certain.